UK government enlists BBC to avoid breaking disability laws

UK government Webmasters have turned to the BBC for a free software fix to help them comply with new laws on disability.

The Disability and Discrimination Act, which comes into force on 1 October, is aimed primarily at high street shops and restaurants, which often do not make provision for the disabled.

But UK Webmasters are obliged from Friday to make "reasonable adjustments" to their sites to ensure the content is accessible to people with sight problems.

Rather than develop its own software, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) will next month roll-out a BBC program, known as Betsie (BBC Education Text to Speech Internet Enhancer).

Betsie presents HTML as text-only content in large fonts, and is the only disability tool recognised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to filter links on the fly.

A spokesman for the DTI said: "The BBC offered it to the government for free and it suits our purposes well."

Other government departments are thought to be evaluating the software, including the Environment Agency.

Wayne Myers, a BBC software engineer who originally developed Betsie for the corporation, said: "There's been a sudden spate of interest from government Webmasters in the past month."

A DfEE (Department for Education and Employment) spokeswoman said policy officials were still consulting lawyers about the new Act's impact on the Web. Interim guidelines, due out on Friday, are likely to say it is not reasonable to expect Web sites with limited resources and non-essential content, to make their pages equally accessible to the disabled.

Webmasters whose sites do not fall into that category can download Betsie from http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/betsie